So Thomas Vinterberg‘s Another Round, which would have screened at the cancelled 2020 Cannes Film Festival and might screen at the 2020 TIFF, apparently serves to remind that drinking too much will destroy your life? Okay, agreed, check.

From Bret Stephens‘ “Reading Orwell for the Fourth of July,” posted on 7.3.20: “Right now all the Twitter furors, the angry rows over publication decisions, the canceled speeches and books, the semantic battles about which words take an uppercase and which don’t…[all of this] may seem remote to those who care about more tangible issues: depression, disease, police abuse, urban decline.

“Yet the issue that counts the most is whether the institutions that are supposed to champion liberal ideals will muster the moral confidence to survive. On this July 4, it’s very much in doubt.

“As in so much else, George Orwell was here before us. In connection to the recent vandalism of monuments and destruction of statues, a line from “1984” has been making the rounds — ‘every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.’

“[This] problem today comes from the left: from liberal elites who, when tested, lack the courage of their liberal convictions; from so-called progressives whose core convictions were never liberal to begin with; from administrative types at nonprofits and corporations who, with only vague convictions of their own, don’t want to be on the wrong side of a P.R. headache.

“This has been the great cultural story of the last few years. It is typified by incidents such as The New Yorker’s David Remnick thinking it would be a good idea to interview Steve Bannon for the magazine’s annual festival — until a Twitter mob and some members of his own staff decided otherwise. Or by The Washington Post devoting 3,000 words to destroying the life of a private person of no particular note because in 2018 she wore blackface, with ironic intent, at a Halloween party. Or by big corporations pulling ads from Facebook while demanding the company do more to censor forms of speech they deem impermissible.

“These stories matter because an idea is at risk. That’s the idea that…no society can long flourish when contrarians are treated as heretics.

“That idea, old as Socrates, formerly had powerful institutional defenders, especially in the form of universities, news media, book publishers, free-speech groups and major philanthropies.

“But those defenders are, on account of one excuse or another, capitulating to people who claim free speech for themselves (but not for others), who believe all the old patriarchal hierarchies must go (so that new “intersectional” hierarchies may arise), who are in a perpetual fervor to rewrite the past (all the better to control the future), and who demand cringing public apologies from those who have sinned against an ever-more radical ideological standard (while those apologies won’t save them from being fired).”

I haven’t splashed around in a pool for a long while. I’ve stood next to pools but at parties…you know. The kids and I used to swim in the West Hollywood community pool back in the mid to late ’90s. I know that if I dive into a pool these days it’s going to take me at least 45 minutes to dry my hair and fluff it up and treat it so it looks right, which is why I’m generally content to just look at pools. I love, however, the thought of clothed people falling into pools or, better yet, being pushed in, especially if they’re dressed to the nines.

I used to swim competitively at the old Mindowaskin Swim Club in Mountainside, NJ. Freestyle, breast stroke, backstroke. I wasn’t strong or disciplined enough to win any blue-ribbons. I was strictly a second- and third-place finisher. Which was the story of my life until journalism started to pan out in the early ’80s.

Two days ago Brie Larson launched a YouTube channel dedicated to social activism. Which sounds like a good thing, and will probably (or at least hopefully) turn out to be that.

Unless, of course, it turns out to be a progressive discussion platform for SJW cancel-culture terror by way of wokester prohibitions, advanced guilt-tripping, 1619 Project loyalty oaths, Robespierre finger-pointing, safe-spacing, editorial fanaticism, Woody Allen sliming and statue tear-downs. Hooray for BLM and #MeToo, but beware of the hardcore Khmer Rouge and their blue plastic bags..

I would be personally blown away if Larson’s channel turns out to be, social justice-wise, more of a 1776 than a 1610 thang, but what are the odds?

After watching the opening video I told myself that nothing good or lasting can come of chatting and alpha-vibing with all those fluffers, sycophants and ass-kissers.

It seems odd that the room in which Larson was recording (presumably in her home) is completely barren. Maybe she just moved in.

But rejected for being too long. So I cut it way down, but in so doing the heart and soul aspects were discarded.

Seriously, what is wrong with these people? I understand paying tribute to two Russian spies who died here in the summer of 1959 — one from a fall after wrestling with a New York advertising man, another shot by U.S. marshalls as he attempted to cause the ad man’s death by stepping on his fingers. But where’s the sense in not wearing masks?

Dawn Porter‘s John Lewis: Good Trouble “opens” today. The Rotten Tomatoes gang approves (91%), and $6.99 for a 48-hour rental window seems reasonable. From Ben Kenigsberg’s N.Y. Times review: ‘Although the film uses a conventional format, it makes an urgent argument: that a new wave of voter suppression has threatened the rights that Lewis labored to secure. That context gives older footage — of Lewis and Julian Bond encouraging voter registration in 1971 in Mississippi, for instance — a renewed power.”

Most of us are willing to buy into a time-travel scenario. All we ask is that the filmmakers supply some kind of half-believable premise (a speeding DeLorean with a flux capacitor, a spinning-wheel time machine built by H.G. Wells) that doesn’t make us choke.

Seth Rogen, Simon Rich and Brandon Trost‘s An American Pickle (HBO Max, 8.6.20) doesn’t even try to respect the basic rules. By insisting on the ridiculous — that a bearded Yiddish immigrant becomes mummified in 1920 after falling into a vat of pickles (i.e., brined alive, escaping death) — they’re more or less giving the friendly finger to HBO Max subscribers.

Basic message: “We could’ve come up with a better time-travel device but we couldn’t be bothered, and you guys don’t give a shit anyway so what does it matter?”

Does anyone care about a relationship between a couple of Jewish dudes separated by 100 years? A Jewish guy who falls into a vat of pickle juice in 1965 might’ve worked. Then you’d have a culture-clash scenario between a young boomer and his Millennial-aged nephew or grandson. People could relate to that on some level, but who cares about an old-school guy from Eastern Europe (basically a riff on the married Yiddish guy from the beginning of A Serious Man)?

Who knows if anyone would want to remake The Rock (celebrating its 25th anniversary next year), but if they tried the dialogue would make absolutely no mention of small-town prom queens being deflowered by ruggedly macho winners.

That whole upscale, sirloin-steak, smart-ass ’90s guy-film genre, pioneered by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Bad Boys, Crimson Tide, The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Enemy of the State, Gone in Sixty Seconds), flourished for only five or six years. It reps a fairly dinosaurish aesthetic by today’s standards. You can’t go home again.

A great, innovative, fresh-water musical, but the moment (i.e., late Obama) has passed and that’s that.

For years I’ve been awaiting the end of superhero megaplex dominance…for the twin giant squids of formulaic entanglement and corporate piss-soaking (DC Extended Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe) to lose their mojo and crash into the streets like the Martian space ships in George Pal‘s War of the Worlds.

Native microscopic organisms killed the aliens in that 1953 classic, and the same kind of biological process has brought a temporary halt to the annual superhero summer onslaught…thank God.

Would superhero flicks be absent without the intervention of COVID-19? No, but the DC/Marvel machine does seem to be slowing down. Either way we’re in the midst of the first spandex-free summer in a dozen years (2008 being the summer of Iron Man).

From A.O. Scott‘s “A Summer Without Superheroes“, posted on 7.1.20: “Popular culture and politics exist on the same wavelength and work together to shape our shared consciousness. The fantasies we buy into with our attention and money condition our sense of what it is possible or permissible to imagine. And the imagination of Hollywood in the franchise era — the age of I.P.-driven creativity and expanded-universe cinema — has been authoritarian, anti-democratic, cynical and pseudo-populist.

“That much of the politics of the past decade can be described with the same words is hardly an accident.

“[But] maybe, as we use this time to rethink many of the other systems that have seemed so immutable, so natural, so much a part of the way things just are, we can reflect on why we thought we needed all those heroes in the first place, or how they were foisted on us. Eventually, we’ll go back to the movies, but maybe we’ll be less docile, less obedient, when we do. I’m not necessarily saying that we should abolish the Avengers or defund the DC universe, but fantasies of power are connected to the actual forms that power takes. What feels like a loss in this superhero-free summer might be liberation.”

What Scott seems to be saying (unless I’m misreading) is that the current surge of BLM, #MeToo and cancel-culture activism by way of loony-left absolutism (i.e., progressive wokester Khmer Rouge enforcement by way of SJW guilt, Robespierre finger-pointing, safe-spacing, editorial fanaticism, Woody Allen sliming and statue tear-downs) may be spawning some kind of psychological antidote to the mass market docility of the superhero era (’08 to ’19)

Clarification: HE doesn’t regard Todd Phillips‘ The Joker as an example of smirking dipshit suffocation — that was an urban noir one-off. And The Batman won’t be this kind of film either, if I know anything about the cinematic inclinations of Matt Reeves.

Four years ago I posted a short list of allegedly classic comedies that have never been funny, and a list of some that have always been funny in the eyes of anyone with half a brain and half of a yen to laugh. Please tell me which films need to be added to either list — thank you.

HE’s Eternal Funnies: Superbad, Groundhog Day, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Graduate, Dr. Strangelove, Slapshot, The Big Lebowski, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Rushmore, The Lady Eve, Some Like It Hot, Sullivan’s Travels, School of Rock, all of the earlier funnier Woody Allen comedies (What’s Up Tiger Lily to Annie Hall), A Fish Called Wanda, In The Loop, Pardon Us (1931 Laurel & Hardy prison comedy), The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, North to Alaska.

HE’s No Longer Funnies: Ghostbusters (NEVER funny), The Blues Brothers (NEVER funny), Mrs. Doubtfire (NEVER funny), Coming to America (NEVER funny), Three Amigos (NEVER funny), none of the Pink Panther comedies, Porky’s, The Philadelpia Story, Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back (Rock Hudson, Doris Day sexual comedies stopped being funny once the sexual revolution took hold in mid ’60s), none of the ZAZ comedies, Howard Hawks‘ Monkey Business, the broader sexual jokes in Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three, Irma La Douce and Kiss me Stupid, The Golden Child (NEVER funny), Withnail & I (NEVER funny).